February 4

1846: Mormon settlers left Nauvoo in Missouri to begin the settlement of the U.S. West.

1866: Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, is alleged to have cured her injuries by opening a Bible.

1905: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and Lutheran pastor who joined a plot to kill Adolf Hitler and was later arrested and hanged by the Nazis, was born in the former German city of Breslau, now Wroclaw, Poland.

2011: The Roman Catholic Diocese of London, Ont., reached settlements with 10 more sexual abuse victims in southwestern Ontario. The settlement involves two disgraced priests and totals more than $1.5-million.

February 5

1555: In the southern part of present-day Germany, the Diet of Augsburg began its final deliberations. Delegates later signed the Peace of Augsburg, granting official recognition to Lutheranism as a religion.

1597: 26 Japanese Christians — six European Franciscan missionaries, three Japanese Jesuits and seventeen Japanese laymen — were crucified for their faith in Nagasaki, Japan. By 1640, thousands had been martyred.

February 6

1902: The first independent Young Women’s Hebrew Association was organized in New York City. It combined religious, social, and cultural recreational activities for young women, especially working girls.

February 7

1478: Sir Thomas More, lord chancellor of England during the English Reformation, was born. More, the author of Utopia, was executed for high treason by Henry VIII in 1535 because he refused to recognize the king as head of the church in England.

February 8

1587: Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded. Attempting to restore Catholicism to England, she began persecuting Protestants. But, largely thanks to the work of John Knox, her attempts failed.

February 9

249: Legends say, the woman who later became St. Appolonia, the patron saint of dentistry, was tortured and killed for being a Christian. Her tormentors broke her teeth with iron points and extracted the roots with tongs.

1404: Constantine Palaeologus, the last emperor of the Byzantine Empire, was born. He died defending Constantinople against the armies of the Muslim Ottoman Turks in 1453.

1881: Novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a devout Russian Orthodox Christian and author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, died. He once wrote “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.”

2011: The Quebec legislature voted unanimously to ban the kirpan from its premises. The vote stemmed from an incident where security guards would not allow Sikhs to carry their ceremonial daggers into the legislature building.